Miami

Didion produces a masterful detailing of Miami history through Cuban immigration and their rise to power in the city. Highly recommended.

The story of the Cuban exiles in Miami deserves to be told with drama and passion because that is what it has been. In this page-turner, Joan Didion captures the rejection and racism that the Cuban exiles first encountered in Miami when they emigrated from Cuba after Castro assumed power. She shows how some of the Cubans became successful businesspersons, political powerbrokers, shapers of local culture, renowned humanitarians and philanthropists, expert propagandists, able diplomats, drug runners, muggers, and internationally renowned terrorists. We see the close relationship the Cuban exiles formed with the USA government, especially its clandestine agencies. We learn that in the 1960s Miami essentially became a CIA recruiting and operational-staging center. Didion tells us that the CIA had as much as 120,000 "regular agents" (full and part-time) stationed in south Florida. It had a flotilla of small boats (often used for terrorist raids on Cuba), making it the third largest navy in the western hemisphere at the time. It owned airline companies in the Miami area and holding companies that lent itself loans for covert operations. "There were [also] hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbors" as well as "fifty five other front businesses" and "CIA boat shops," "guns shops," real-estate, travel and detective agencies (pp. 90-91). Yet the relationship between the Cuban Americans and the USA has been a troubled one. Although the Cuban Americans find themselves dependent on the USA for maintaining their struggle against Castro, they also don't trust the government, blaming it for their loss at the Bay of Pigs and for adopting policies soft on Castro. Likewise, the USA finds some Cuban Americans helpful in its secret foreign adventures (Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.) as well as a nuisance when these terrorist elements assassinate foreign diplomats, blow up airplanes and banks, and murder USA citizens. Particularly poignant is Didion's description of the Cuban Americans' personal and often internecine struggle over understanding themselves as immigrants or exiles. These struggles have resulted in broken friendships, shunning, public ridicule, financial loss, bodily harm and death. The book only covers Miami until 1987. I wish Didion would update the book, although it might be dangerous for her to do so. This is a great read and well worth the purchase.

I read this book so many years ago, but I just now realized I had never shared my opnions about it. I had lived in Miami for about eight years, and I think I was in my 5th year or so when I finally heard about "Miami" by Joan Didion. It was only after I had finally moved to the Beach that I happened upon it, at Kafka's. At any rate, it is an excellent book. I think about it every time I hear on the news about the bumbling CIA or news of Castro makes the NYTimes. Incidentally, 1987 also saw the publication of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," by Edna Buchanan, another equally excellent non-fiction book about this city. I also highly recommend "A Book of Common Prayer" by Ms. Didion.

I've got a bone to pick with Joan Didion, but first let me say that "Miami" is a simply brilliant piece of noir journalism that, in every paragraph, reflects a different aspect of "the Capital of Latin America." Odd that 1987 saw three major non-fiction Miami treatments, all differently motivated: David Rieff's "Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America," T.D. Allman's "Miami: City of the Future," and Didion's book. Yeah, yeah, at the time, Miami was hot hot hot, Crockett and Tubbs were in the middle of their run, but...Iran-Contragate was also playing itself out, and Miami was an epicenter of Reagan-era, better-dead-than-Red, Contra War intrigue. Didion captures the period beautifully in suitably ominous, conspiratorial tones. She introduces us to a cast of chilling characters--no, wait: she means for us to UNDERSTAND her characters as the driven, chilling, formidable products of "el exilio" and "la lucha"--and leaves no doubt that these are serious men, men who "get things done," men capable of, well, anything.And my bone? Didion is a wonderful writer who cannot, however, resist long, convoluted, patience-trying Germanic sentences, frontloaded with the universe, embellishing adjective after adjective, wending their way down the page, forestalling all gratification, clarity, or meaning, until finally hitting us between the eyes with the final word-punchline, which invariably leads our eyes to course back up the page in an effort to reconstruct, to rediscover "just where were we going with this." Small price to pay for so delicious a book.

As a 23 year resident in Miami (from NYC) I was astonished at Didion's eloquent articulation of what I haven't been able to describe but have pondered over these many years--the cultural and cognitive disconnect between native Americans and disgruntled Cuban exiles. They talk about LA, but Miami really is Never-Never Land with impossibly obdurant and involuntary immigrants who have no clue or stake in the American values of reasoned discourse, free speech, and fair play and no desire to abandon the cultural attributes that have allowed them to suffer under one form of tyranny or another for a long long time. This books explains what they are thinking--the Cubans--and why they behave the way they do. Well-researched, accurate, and beautifully crafted prose.